Zemindar

Wow. WOWW.

OK, so this is a historical romance set in 1857 India. It was recommended to me by Claude (AI) after a long discussion where I shared (a) my youthful, torrid fanfic habits, and (b) my love and knowledge of India. Claude assured me I would love this and that, no, it was not colonialist claptrap and my sensitive liberal heart would be unscathed. And oh, how right Claude was!

Briefly, the story: Laura Hewitt is a “spinster” - aka, an unmarried 20something - accompanying her super bitchy (sorry but not sorry, totally true) cousin, Emily, to India on the latter's fairly ambitious honeymoon with her new husband, Charles. The story is fairly straightforward. It begins on the boat from England. They land in Calcutta (Kolkota). They travel inland to Lucknow. They meet Charles's half-brother, Oliver Erskine, who is a “zemindar” (landlord) of a big plot of land in a remote part of the country (outside of Lucknow). It's 1857, so a war explodes. Laura and Oliver fall in love.

OK, but... THIS BOOK, MAN. THIS BOOK.

First of all, this book was a brick - 800 pages! - and each page was alive with OH THE HUMANITY. I will be shelving this book right next to the nonfic version of a tempestuous love story amid troubled historical times: Indian Summer. This book was also kinda like a very specific type of hip-hop track where the lyrics are super basic, but the production and samples are eye-poppingly WOW. That was this book.

The bars, aka the romance plot
This part was, tbh, fairly pedestrian. All the usual beats are here. Oliver is a basic Byronic bro. I appreciated him... a bit. I mostly appreciated Laura, who was also a basic protagonist - smart, sensible, aka completely relatable to me, the reader. Their love story - the way they meet, the way they are torn apart, blah blah - was all very predictable. Gratifying as well, but literally nothing here was new or energizing. It was completely meh.

But the production!!!! aka, the background, the context, the everything else
THIS. THIS!!!!! THIS was CHEF'S KISS. The portrayal of daily life for a British woman in 1857 India - from the banal British bubble during peacetime, to the devastation and deprivations of the Siege of Lucknow - this was written with SUCH a rich, tactile feel. GAHHHH. I LIVED and BREATHED this woman's life. I also adored the rich characterizations of her milieu - each person felt so vivid and understandable (even that b, Emily). For much of the book, I realized, our protagonist, Laura, just kinda... observes. It's written in the first person. And her meditations on daily life, both in peacetime and war, were so, so, SO on-point. I really was struck by a lot of what she said. And even though her life was 150 years ago, in a totally different context, I couldn't help thinking: plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

But let us dwell now on colonialism. Because that was really at the forefront of my mind (and, uh, at the forefront of a lot of people's minds in 1857).

Laura is basically a Hilary Clinton-style liberal Democrat, living in her British bubble. She is extremely curious about India - she starts to learn Urdu, she wonders about the people she sees, etc - but she has, well, no Indian friends. Indeed, her life is VERY ensconced in this British life. Oliver, instead, is an Englishman born in India, to an English father also born in India. He's a bit like Kim , in that he can straddle the two cultures with relative comfort. And he is, like Kim, loyal to both.

Given these two characters, it was VERY strange to read a book about India - and about this time period - that features near-zero Indian voices. There are a few characters who emerge from the otherwise undistinguished crowds (as another review said): Wajid Khan, Moti, Ungud. And there were some great moments with each of them. But they are NOWHERE NEAR as fleshed out as the British characters.

In a way, this constricted, purely-British perspective felt suffocating. I kept wanting Laura to talk to someone - ANYONE - outside of her bubble. And, again, she kinda does. But she's a Hilary Clinton type: she's not a radical anti-colonialist. She's a liberal/pragmatist. But then I realized - by giving us this view of Basic British Colonist, we get a view into the daily machinery of colonialism. It was incredibly fascinating (and tragic) to see how the narrative about their own struggle was developed (e.g. the horrors of the Bibighar massacre). I actually spent a LOT of time wondering about how these traumatized British survivors returned home, and what they carried with them - how that indignant trauma informed the colonial narrative in the UK. (Side note, but the Siege of Lucknow section was very reminiscent of JG Ballard's memoir of being interned in a prisoner of war camp during WW2.)

The author does a great job here of showing the moments when Laura glimpses outside her British bubble's narrative: for example, I won't spoil it, but when she encounters a young wounded soldier towards the end of the book. Another moment when she marvels at the fetishized paranoia around rape by an Indian soldier... vs. the normalizing of being raped by a British soldier. It's all nuts! NUTS!! At one moment, Laura despairs at humanity and how stupid and brutal humans are. It's really true!!! So I guess the book is great in its ultimate moral: choose love!

Addendum: The cast
Oh, and because obviously I cast this in my head, here they are:
Laura - me, obviously
Oliver - Lee Pace
Kate Barry - Kathy Bates
Mr. Rogers - Richard Briers, he was in Much Ado About Nothing (1993) as the father of Hero, remember??
Wajid Khan - Jammubhai from Mississippi Masala (aka Aanjjan Srivastav)